Josh Davis AKA DJ Shadow, was born in 1973 in Davis, California. He is one of the most influential and experimental hip hop producers of the last decade. Shadow has made a name for himself as a collage artist of samples, with many of his compositions consisting entirely of samples from other recordings and containing no original recordings whatsoever. As a teenager, Shadow was a DJ on a local radio station in his hometown of Davis, KDVS. While working for the station, he worked to develop the experimental hip hop style associated with the California-based Solesides record label, along with now famous label mates Lateef the Truthspeaker and Lyrics Born. These early works were the beginning of his mixing of genres within a single composition, including funk, rock, hip hop, ambient, jazz, and soul. His sources of sounds were used records – he is a noted vinyl collector, and proponent of ‘digging’, a tradition of raiding used record stores for hidden gems within piles of thousands of obscure and esoteric recordings.

Shadow’s first full-length album, Endtroducing, was released in 1996 to massive acclaim both among hip hop and electronic music circles, as well as by much of the popular music media in the US and Europe. The album was the culmination of Shadow’s experiments composing with samples, and is in the Guinness book of world records as the first fully sample-based album- every sound used in its creation is taken from another recording, usually from obscure sources among Shadow’s massive record collection. The result is a haunting work of musical creativity – difficult to categorize and engaging to listen to.

Previous to Endtroducing, DJ Shadow had released a few singles for the fledgling record label Mo Wax, and in 1998 he collaborated with ‘Wax founder James Lavelle to create the UNKLE project, a more hip hop oriented album with a number of high-profile collaborators, including the Beastie Boys’ Mike D and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

Around this time Shadow’s music began appearing in movies, including Wisconsin Death Trip, and Dark Days, a documentary about homeless people living in tunnels beneath NYC.

In 2002, Shadow released his second full-length album entitled The Private Press. This new record seemed a natural progression from Endtroducing and UNKLE, including a heavier dose of original recorded material intermixed with the collage of samples. The album went even further into the mixing of genres, with tracks touching on punk, disco, breakbeats, and ‘60s pop music. One track, Monosyllabik, was created by stretching, treating and manipulating samples from one funk single, in a process akin to aural stop-frame animation. In the same year Shadow appeared in the highly acclaimed hip hop documentary “Scratch”, including film of his digging in the basement of a record store that warehouses hundreds of thousands of records, only accessible to certain people permitted by the store’s owners.

Now DJ Shadow, a longtime resident of San Francisco, is releasing a new album entitled The Outsider, which will be available September 4th. In keeping with his tradition of constantly evolving, the new record is almost schizophrenic in its jumping between genres, with little intermixing. One track will be high energy Bay Area hyphy rap, with another being a gentle folk ballad. Another is a leftover piece of music from a long-dead collaboration with Zach De La Rocha. And a few others are reminiscent of Shadow’s past, with haunting soundscapes of found music. Shadow has written that the change in himself and in his music was heavily influenced by two near-tragedies in his life over the past 3 years: a car accident in London when the driver of a cab he was riding in fell asleep at the wheel, and the near-fatal monoamniotic pregnancy of his wife, a condition wherein his then unborn twin daughters were developing in the same sac in the womb. Shadow has said that these occurrences were enough to kick him in to realizing that he needed to do what he wanted to do, knowing that he could run out of time at any minute. He is extremely unapologetic about music in his new album that moves in to a more mainstream rap arena, one that he has admired from afar for many years, only infrequently doing remix projects for more mainstream rap artists.

Shadow’s influence on hip hop, indeed on popular music as a whole is profound – he tooke the use of samples to one of its furthest extremes, and has spawned a host of imitators and disciples, including producers like RJD2, Dangermouse, and Diplo. DJ Shadow will be performing at the Rave in Milwaukee in early October 2006, as part of a tour promoting The Outsider.